We were invincible, we Celtic Tigers. To celebrate the millennium, tigers all bought new cars . . . just for that 00 reg cachet. Tigers demanded impossibly high wages . . . and got them, or walked off and got a job elsewhere.

Tigers took out mortgages with crazily high multiples of their impossibly high salaries and spent unfeasibly large sums on their amazingly well-located homes . . . and then gutted them and spent more on anything and everything they could think of buying.

Tigers bought second homes in Spain, France, Bulgaria . . . anywhere that was cheaper than here and offered "good capital appreciation".

Tigers embraced shopping; labels, shoes, bags . . . as many symbols of the money in our designer wallets as we could possibly show without appearing too common.

Tigers had just 1.4 children (Census 2006) and paid for private education and private healthcare . . .

as well as private nursing homes for their parents Tigers bought houses as tax write-offs in "rural renewal" areas and let them stand empty.

Now, with the interest rates on our impossibly high mortgages double what they were just a couple of years ago, we're beginning to experience that distinctively unTigerish emotion . . . OMG, the pinch.

That housing market on which we'd staked most, if not all, of our futures is slowing rather faster than we would have liked.

Nobody's saying it's a slump, but when you're used to doubling the price of your property every four years, staying the same feels like going backwards.

Nobody's saying unemployment will rise dramatically, but when it's been a non-issue for a decade, its possible re-emergence is a heavy psychological blow.

When there's no money any more to buy private healthcare or schooling, the glaring deficiencies of what the state provides become clear.

Rather than promising everything and delivering little, whoever wins the next election needs to promise little and deliver a lot.